Perhaps One Day This Will All Make Sense

Andrew Johnson

In the meantime, nothing of any significance happens along the way, nothing worth mentioning, at least in proportion to expectation.

Just the same house on the same block. Same kitchen, same countertops, appliances, utensils, same way of harnessing fire to make the meal. Same plumbing, same pipes set at slight angles, leaning the liquid in and out. Same windows letting in light, same squares of sunshine sliding back east all afternoon across the floor.

Here we are again with the same four seasons. Again with the summertime butterflies applauding some event we can’t see, the slow formation of beads along brow lines, salt streaks left on shirtsleeves. Again with the autumn and all the usual reasons for thanks, turning finished fields like folding palms in a lap, haloes on harvest moons, the sputtering sounds of children shooting like sparks from school yards and blazing home. Again the winter, the darkening daylight, snowflakes landing and interlocking on our paths, our packing in closer merely for warmth, the turning of a year like palms slowly unfolding again. Again with springtime, again here comes another opening. Just as we knew it would.

Another day in the light of our star, another night in the dome of a thousand other stars, a thousand other suns that spin their own worlds around the rooms of their systems, the same gravity in varying degrees pulling and pushing, the same speed the light must travel to reach our eyes, the same path a star will follow from white dwarf to red giant to black and gone, the same inability of ours to tell if a distant star is still burning or already dead.

Nothing new forming in our bodies, just the usual offspring with their chanced beginnings, their rapid splitting of cells, growing on the end of a placenta cord like a blown balloon, base-level turning of mother’s food into skin, bone, lungs, heart, mind, soul. The usual way mother can feel, can know, can open, deliver, bring, birth, the way the sightless newborn will claw and crawl over the vacated womb, open its mouth wide, latch, suck, drink, and live. Nothing new but the usual rearing, the growth, the launching of one more mind, a balloon floating over a landscape, one individual mind bright and buoyant, just one more with a mind of its own.

Same buildings with doors that open into lobbies, identical stairs leading upward as usual and predictably back down. Same bodies more or less, moving these minds about, or the other way around, either way, no matter. Same blank page with negotiable margins and the standard array of possibilities. Same new day.

Andrew Johnson lives in Kansas City, Missouri. His essays have appeared in MAKE, Sonora Review, Passages North, and Saint Katherine Review, and are forthcoming in Confrontation, New Madrid, and Storm Cellar. He is currently at work on a collection of micro-essays.